by Ryan Schow
Armageddon.
When he’d come upon the pile-up of vehicles, he moved from car to car checking the bodies. When he got to the woman, he’d stopped. She was a looker. But dead. He almost moved on, but he didn’t. It wasn’t because of her good looks, it was because he caught a glimpse of a very weak pulse beating in her neck.
As good as dead, he thought.
Or not.
Standing there in that moment, thinking about all the lives he’d taken over the years, he realized it was high time he try to balance the scales and save a few, even if the effort seemed futile. Certain the drones had gone, he looked in on the woman with greater focus.
The airbag had gone off and hit her in the face, breaking her nose. Another car had t-boned her on the driver’s side. The driver of the offending car (a twenty-something Asian kid with half his face ripped off) had flown through the windshield and slammed head-first into the side of this woman’s A pillar. Looking at the kid’s car, he saw no airbags. An unbuckled seatbelt. His neck was broken in half and lolling to the side at an extremely unnatural angle. The eye that was least damaged was open wide, glassed over with death.
When he dragged the boy’s ravaged body out of the way, the woman in the car moved just enough to let him know she wasn’t a lost cause after all.
The driver’s side window was glass shards everywhere. Blonde hair was matted red. The woman’s nose was slightly crooked, twin streams of blood flooding her generous lips, staining her perfectly white teeth in splotchy dollops of crimson.
For a second he saw her nice clothes, her jewelry, her manicured nails and he almost left her. He hated that sometimes he thought like that, but he did. His experiences with wealthy women were varied, none of them good.
Would this be different?
At this point, the fires in front of and behind her car were spreading. The bodies inside these automobiles were engulfed in flames, and it reminded him of the war overseas, of a village he and his team once cleared using M4A1’s and napalm.
Looking away, forcing himself to grab the woman and carry her to safety, he wondered if saving her might relieve a bit of the karmic burden now plaguing him daily.
Standing in that village, he’d watched the bodies burn, and he did nothing.
Back then, he’d been remiss to save a single soul. Not because he didn’t want to, but because the death of innocents was the cruel message they were sending. It turned out, the message meant for someone else was seared so permanently into his mind that not a day went by when he wasn’t tortured by these memories.
Self-loathing often made him careless with his life which, in turn, took his hard edges and made them razor sharp. He was an efficient killer only because he had so much pain and rage inside him that when it came out, often the only thing left behind were tarns of blood, and a stack of bodies. He was a smile on the outside, a calm demeanor, a man at peace with his surroundings. But inside, he was barely held together and only by the sheer force of will alone.
Then along came this woman…
She weighed nothing in his arms as he carried her to the compound. He knew they had a doctor there, a student rather, and he knew this was his only chance to get the woman the medical attention she needed.
Her injuries were superficial by the look of it, but beyond that he didn’t know what kind of internal bleeding she might have and he wasn’t about to inspect her without her permission, which she couldn’t give to him while unconscious.
Two or three times she woke up, coughing, crying, mumbling incoherently. He simply did the best he could to reassure her, and to get her to safety as quickly as possible. It was no easy task and twice they were nearly eviscerated by drones.
He got her to the college though, to the doctor. The doctor, of course, had been Sarah. Sarah whose name he hadn’t known just yet. On the bed, the young doctor said, “Wow, she’s beautiful,” to which Rider said, “True beauty lies beneath the skin. She could be the ugliest woman you’ll ever meet and we wouldn’t know it until she speaks.”
“Do you think we should let her die?” Sarah asked, deadpan, but stopping what she was doing to look up at Rider.
“I have a quarter,” he said, matching her expression. “We can flip, if you want.”
“Okay,” she said. “You flip it, I’ll call it.”
He took the coin, flipped it in the air and she called heads. It was heads. “So normally I wouldn’t have you do this, but there’s no one else I really know, and you’re the one who brought her here...”
“What are you asking?”
“I need to inspect her body, and I need your help. We have to check for cuts, lacerations, indications of internal bleeding—”
“I thought you could do that, you’re the doctor. I’m just…I’m just a good Samaritan who didn’t ask for any of this.”
Ignoring him, she lifted the woman’s sweater. Her stomach was flat, flawless, her breasts small but cupped nicely by an expensive, bejeweled bra. Rider looked away, uncomfortable. He felt Sarah look up at him, thought she might’ve smiled.
“You gay?”
“If I was,” he replied, “I wouldn’t look away.”
“She’s unconscious,” Sarah said, examining her body. “She’s not going to mind.” When she pulled the shirt back down, she said, “We have to turn her over.”
They did.
Again, she lifted the woman’s shirt and checked her torso. There were bruises, but they were external. Nothing appeared to be broken.
“My name is Rider,” he’d said to Sarah, awkward.
“Got a last name?”
“Not really.”
“Well it’s a good name,” she replied. Back then, she didn’t give her name and he didn’t ask. He preferred to just call her “Doc” and she seemed to like it just fine.
“I’m not a real doctor you know,” she said. “I’m just a second year.”
“Well I’m not a real rider. I’m just a guy. If my name was any indication of what I do, it would be Walker, but that sounds too much like The Walking Dead and I don’t want anyone thinking of me as a zombie, even though most days that’s exactly how I feel.”
If he was named for what he did, in all honesty he’d be called Killer, but no one really ever gets that special feeling for you if your name is synonymous with murder.
He smiled; she smiled.
That was that.
Over the days, he came to see this mystery woman, but she was sleeping a lot. She’d had a concussion, a broken nose (which he helped the doctor reset that day), lacerations on the side of her head and burns on her face and forearms from the airbag deploying.
Yet she was still an attractive woman.
He never stared at her for too long because in times of war, you don’t obsess over women as much as you do your best to survive. Women were a distraction, and he was in war mode.
Sometimes, though, he looked at her thoughtfully. Tried to imagine what she was like inside. Tried to guess at who she’d been in the real world.
Shaking his head more times than not, he thought, this woman is taking me places I can’t afford to go just yet. And the doctor? She was no help either. She was easy on the eyes as well, competent and witty, blessed with a lighthearted sense of humor that came off as something of a miracle considering the absolute hell they were under.
But she was young. Too young.
That’s why Rider eventually left the compound. Well, that and one other reason. The mystery woman, in one of her waking moments, was asking for someone. She was repeating a name. Rider put his ear close to her mouth, caught the name, then asked where she was and the woman told him. Because he was growing fond of Sarah, because he found himself thinking more about her and their patient than surviving, he needed to go, to walk, to have a mission.
Finding this girl was his mission.
Indigo.
After a few days he found her, but he didn’t want to bring her back to the compound because she was a girl who was surviving on her ow
n just fine. The girl was every bit as competent as Sarah, just younger. Less jovial. If he took her from her home, everything she was developing in herself would come to a swift and jarring halt. The last thing this world needed, Rider had been thinking to himself, was another follower.
He recognized in this teenager true survivability and this made him want to check back in on her. He had people at the compound to take care of though, friends to help, responsibilities that had his name written on them.
They say inside of a year, after the grid goes down, power goes out and society is thrust headlong into the dark ages, most of the population dies. This is no real news. Certainly not to a guy like Rider.
What they don’t tell you is how all these people come to die. What happens to them when they get hungry, when they need a place to stay, when supplies run out and food goes rotten and clean water and functional sewage systems are a thing of the past. What they don’t say is that people will always fall back to their base instincts and that’s when you separate the wheat from the chaff, the wolves from the sheep. Rider was a wolf. He would survive.
But everyone else?
Well, he thought, it was best not to get too attached.
Yet there he was, getting attached. He’d just asked Sarah out for a walk and now he was here with the woman whose name he still didn’t know. There was a ring on her finger, but when he found Indigo, there was no father figure around. It was just her.
The woman slowly worked her eyes open. One of them was shot through with red from the trauma to her head, but not like before. She was looking a lot better. Nearly perfect.
“You,” she said.
“Me.”
“I dreamt of you,” she said, groggy.
“I’m afraid your dreams might be mixing with reality, which has become somewhat of a nightmare of late.”
“So I know you?”
“Not really.”
“But you know me?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“Why are you here then?” she said, her eyes heavy, her body willing her back to sleep.
“I’m the one who brought you here,” he said, grinding his molars because honestly he didn’t want to admit that. To admit he had saved her would be binding them together, and having people bound to you was crippling. At least, that’s how it felt to Rider.
“You saved me?” she asked, her voice scratchy, her eyes full of foggy wonder.
“It was nothing,” he said. “The effort, I mean. All life has value and yours needed saving.”
She took his hand, and it was soft—the skin of her hand on his. He hadn’t held a woman’s hand in well over a year, so experiencing the rapture of human touch was both heart rending and uncomfortable. He inched his hand out of hers then she settled back down, the effort having sapped most of her energy.
“Am I okay?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t feel well, though,” she all but whispered.
“You had a concussion, a broken nose, some bruising. Do cuts heal slowly for you? Or burns? Things like that?”
“Before, no. I used to heal just fine. But now, yes, things have slowed down significantly.”
Her face was profound sadness. He didn’t understand.
“What do you mean?” he forced himself to ask.
Looking right into his eyes and not blinking, she said, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, because I’m grateful for you and what you’ve done, but I have cancer. I was already dying before you found me.”
Now he sagged into his body so hard it made him not only mad about this life, but enthusiastically pissed off that he opened that part of himself up to care about a woman who was going to die anyway.
“You’re still young,” he said, his voice tender, unguarded.
She swallowed hard, cleared her throat, then looked at him and said, “Cancer doesn’t care if you’re forty or eighty, or even ten for that matter.”
“People are beating it though,” he said, sounding desperate even to himself. “There’s a chance, right?”
“Where am I?” she finally asked, looking around. “This doesn’t look like a hospital.”
“Do you even know what’s going on out there?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted.
“The drones, the city, the AI? Any of that ring a bell?” he asked, looking right at her, not knowing how to delicately put the fact that society as they knew it had been crushed under the boot of innovation and technological advancement.
“What’s AI?”
“Artificial Intelligence.”
“How does any of this explain why I’m here?” she said, her eyes so heavy, her petite body growing so still he wondered if she even bore the strength necessary to hear and comprehend what he had to say. In the end, he decided the truth would be too traumatizing. He’d wait a few days, fill her in on things then.
“When you’re feeling rested, I’ll tell you, but for now, just sleep.”
She reached out, rested her hand on his forearm and closed her eyes. “Thank you for what you did.”
And then she drifted off to sleep again, her breathing deepening, her body once again finding reprieve in its slumber. He sat with her for the better part of an hour until Sarah came in and said, “Did you get a chance to talk to her?”
“I did,” he said.
“And?”
“I wish I would have never saved her.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Raymond King, a.k.a. “Kingpin Ray,” sat at a large desk in the enormous Sutter Health building on California and Cherry with his fingers tented and his three generals standing before him. A bottle of Scotch stood open and breathing, but as much as he enjoyed the idea of the finer things in life, what he really wanted was the power back and an ice cold Corona.
Times were changing, though. He had to change with them.
If he played his cards right, he would command an army by the month’s end, and at the head of this army stood his enforcers, all reliable men, all loyal beyond measure.
Looking around he said, “Am I to assume you want to rule this city by force?”
Salazar said, “Indeed.”
Salazar was his most loyal man, his chief enforcer and a friend. He was not seeing the bigger picture though, and King intended to be clear. “In a city that’s been overwhelmed by force, what you need to lead is not more force.”
“We’re a gang,” Salazar argued. “We control things, we sell things, we kill things if necessary. These are the basic tenants we agreed to when forming The Ophidian Horde.”
King finally took a sip of the Scotch, let it warm his throat and belly, then said, “One of the first things I learned when reading Sun Tzu’s Art of War was to read the landscape. Do you think the landscape now is the same as it was a month ago?”
“Obviously not.”
“Outwardly, we appeal to the people. From there we will create our own landscape from which to dominate.”
“We’re not politicians,” Salazar snipped, causing the other two enforcers to give a unifying nod.
“True, we’re less corrupt, I’ll give you that. But that isn’t the point.”
“You want to use the carrot not the stick,” Salazar said.
“No, I want to be more like the pied piper. We’ll sell safety. We’ll sell security. And when the time is right, we’ll have everything we want, but with the cooperation of the people, not the pushback.”
“Why must we rely upon benevolence as a measure of control when weapons work so much better?”
“Do you have a problem with that?” he asked.
“Others will.”
King shifted in his chair, took another shot. “Those who don’t do it our way, those within our ranks anyway, they are to be killed on site. Compliance will surely follow. We are not one gang but the dissidents of many. I don’t expect everyone to see it my way just yet, but they will and you will help them.”
Salazar now stood uncomfortably on his fe
et. King knew it would come to this. The sooner they discussed this the better.
“We’re not the only outfit here, King.”
“That goes without saying.”
“What about their captains? Their lieutenants? Their soldiers? With them, you don’t just lop off the head and expect the body to die with it. You lop off the head and expect another, more grislier head to grow back.”
“All the other gangs will fall if we do this right. We’ll sweep in the soldiers, the lieutenants, the captains if need be. Collect all those willing to share the vision.”
“What you’re suggesting is starting a war of epic proportion,” Gomez said. He was the newest of King’s enforcers, a fierce man, an unwavering man.
“This is the single most important power grab we’ll ever have at our disposal,” King said. “If you think they’re thinking anything different, if you think they’re not in some place exactly like this planning our swift demise, they you are gravely mistaken and in no way deserving of the position I’ve provided you.”
Kingpin Ray watched his right hand man grinding his molars. Finally Salazar drew a short, sharp breath through his nose and lifted his chin. “So we are going to be soft to the people, but hard with our rivals?”
“This is a new world and we have to be a new gang. So yes.”
Salazar ripped his .45 loose, fired two quick rounds into Raymond King’s head. His friend’s skull snapped back, two smoking holes in his forehead, and then he slumped over sideways and that was that.
Salazar was the ranking enforcer, so with King dead, he took King’s place. Yelling at his friend’s corpse, accentuating his points with the thrust of his smoking gun, he said, “We are going to be hard all the time! This city does not need benevolence right now, they need a leader who is not afraid to make tough choices!”
